


This is just a courtesy call

by PrimalScream



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Heavy Angst, M/M, this is at its core a silverflint story, thomas and james are together but it's not explicit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-15
Updated: 2017-11-15
Packaged: 2019-02-03 00:52:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,269
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12737712
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PrimalScream/pseuds/PrimalScream
Summary: I don't even know what to say. This is painful, sort of canon compliant. Set after S4. Sometimes love isn't enough and it doesn't conquer all.





	This is just a courtesy call

John wakes with the remnants of a scream lodged in his throat and a thin layer of sweat covering his entire body. He takes a deep breath blowing it out slowly trying to calm his racing heart. His body feels leaden, the ache of exhaustion blanketing him; his lack of sleep has finally begun to take its toll physically, in addition to mentally.

He swings his legs over the edge of his cot and lets his right foot rest on the slightly cooler wood hoping to bring his core temperature down. He runs his hands over his face, rubbing the sleep from his eyes, digging his palms in until he starts to see white spots and the pounding at his temples moves to an ache behind his eyes. With a sigh he straps on his new peg and makes his way to the wash bowl across the room. He sluices water over his face and shoulders, it’s barely cooler than the air temperature, but at least it washes the stench of sweat from his face and chest. 

Wisps of the dream curl around him like smoke. He leans heavily against the table, bent over, hands planted firmly on the wooden surface, his eyes staring sightlessly ahead. When he closes them again, he sees James, as he always appears to John of late, his body riddled with bullets, broken and bloody, his hands shackled, his eyes staring accusingly just before they go lifeless. John shakes the imagine off as he stands back up. He hopes that this time his screams haven’t woken half the camp, or rather that they hadn’t woken one person in particular. Those hopes are dashed minutes later when he hears the creak of wood from just outside his door. Madi enters quietly, a blanket wrapped around her shoulders, her heavily pregnant belly sticking out through the gap in the fabric.

“You’re dreaming of him again.”

John can only nod, his jaw clenched, his throat still too tight for words. He hears her sigh as she moves closer to him. “Why will you not go to him? You know where he is. He would not turn you away.” Her voice is soft and soothing, gentle in a way that he doesn’t deserve. Part of him wishes he could go back; back to before he realized what James meant to him, back to before John thought he’d be able to live without him, back to before he’d betrayed her trust, back to before he had lost everything that meant something to him

John can’t help but snort, “Wouldn’t he?”

She rests her hand in the center of his back, “He has asked after you. He still has concern for you.” 

John can only close his eyes and shake his head. He doesn’t want to know, yet he can’t help but ask, “He’s alright? The both of them?”

“They’re well, yes. Settled now in a house far inland, away from the danger of being found out.”

John nods, and just like always a kernel of relief sweeps through him knowing that James is alive and safe and happy, “I’m sorry I woke you. You should go back.”

He hears her sigh softly just before he loses the warmth of her hand. He fights the sting in his eyes, he’s made his choices, as Billy had so eloquently told him, and now he has to live with them.

With a look to the sky he decides to try for a few more hours of sleep. 

***

“Mr. Silver?”

John is started from his nap, his body instantly on alert. He pushes his hat up to uncover his eyes. John is met with nearly perfectly coifed blond hair, and assessing blue gaze. John doesn’t need to ask the man his name to know who he is, James’s descriptions had been more than accurate. His surprise is quickly eclipsed by worry as he sits up fully, the legs of his chair slamming down onto the wooden porch “James?”

Thomas shakes his head, “He’s fine.” 

John settles back into his chair with a nod, “What do you want?”

If Thomas is startled by John's abruptness, he doesn’t show it, “May we speak privately?”

John takes a look around and notices at least a dozen eyes watching them, he stands and leads Thomas inside. Thomas walks around John’s hut, his eyes flicking over his meager belongings while rubbing his forehead with his hand, “He’s unsettled.” John says nothing, arms crossed against his chest as he leans in the doorway watching Thomas take measure of his life. He’s not entirely sure why Thomas is here or what he wants. Thomas looks down at his hands and swallows hard, “He dreams about you. Calls your name in the dead of the night.” John feels like he should apologize, but the soft flutter in his stomach has taken his voice. “He misses you, but he won’t seek you out. I hear the same is true for you, yet you don’t seek him either. So I’ve taken it upon myself to fetch you.”

“Fetch me?” John straightens and takes a few steps sideways, as if Thomas is going to lunge across the space, pick him up and put him in a burlap sack to be carried over his shoulder, “What the fuck for?”

“He cares for you, a great deal, and until he can get closure with you, he and I can’t move forward. Perhaps you could benefit from it as well.” John can see the unease on Thomas’s frame at the suggestion that John and James have unfinished business.

“The answer is no.” No matter the number of things left unsaid between them, no good could possibly come of them opening those wounds. John motions toward the door, “You can find your way out.” John turns his back and busies himself with making up his bed. He waits silently for retreating footsteps only to be disappointed when he hears none.

“I’m not leaving this camp without you.” 

John feels anger welling inside himself but he tamps it down, “Suit yourself.”

Thomas eventually takes his leave of John’s home, but he stays in the camp just as he’d said he would. He spends most of his time with Madi and her family. John watches friendship grow between them and he can’t help the seething jealousy that eats at him. Not only does Thomas have James, he’s now also charmed his way into Madi’s good graces. John avoids them both like the plague, spending his days in the jungle or down on the beach, anywhere that they’re not. 

A month passes and still Thomas stays. After six weeks John gives in. He tells Thomas that he’ll accompany him back to Georgia. The journey takes weeks. Weeks of stony silences that set John’s nerves on edge and make his teeth ache from gritting them every waking moment. John has long since lost his gift of gab and even had he not, he has very little to say to the man who has everything John wants. 

Thomas hadn’t actually been wrong. There is so much unsaid and undone between himself and James. So many things that John wishes he could have voiced, things he wishes he’d recognized for what they were at the time. He misses James in a way he’d never known it was possible to miss someone. The phantom pain in his leg has nothing on the pain that radiates through his entire body when he remembers the way James had smiled at him during their sparring sessions on the cliff. He’d never understood how important a single person could be until it was too late. 

By the time they reach James and Thomas’s cabin, John is exhausted in body and soul. His mind is unable to rest at night while his body tries to sleep. His dreams are filled with images of James, memories of them together combined with nightmares of his non existent death. The ache that lies deep within him that he’d managed to start closing in the months following James’s departure, has now been ripped open and laid bare by Thomas’s insistence that he see James again.

More than once Thomas has had to shake him awake from one nightmare or the other. The look of sympathy on his face tells John that his dreams haven’t been silent. In the ether he begs for James’s forgiveness, bares his soul to the man he’d loved so completely that he’d failed to recognize it at first. How pitiful must he seem to Thomas, pining for a man he can never have?

John doesn’t know what Thomas had hoped to accomplish with this little trip but he’ll see soon enough that there’s nothing left to be said between him and James, and if James’s stony look, and the tightness around his eyes is anything to go by, he feels exactly the same.

As James watches them approach from across the yard, John can just make out the tick in his jaw. The familiarity of it almost makes John smile. Thomas ushers him in quickly, up the steps and past James. He sits John down in a chair in what he can only assume is the dining room and then motions James to the kitchen based on the view John has before the door closes. 

John can hear their raised voices through the door.

_“Why the fuck would you bring him here?”_

__

__

__John wishes the words didn’t sting quite so much, but he understands the sentiment. He doesn’t quite know what Thomas had hoped for, but John imagines James’s ire isn’t it.

_“You need closure. Whatever was between the two of you is still haunting you and I can’t bear to see it eat away at you any longer.”_

Even through the frustration John can hear the concern for James’s well being in Thomas’s tone. 

Their voices lower to a murmur and John can no longer make out what they’re saying. Every fiber of him is demanding he leave, that he get up from this table and just start walking toward the sea. He’d find it eventually, James had taught him to navigate by the stars after all. He could elude them long enough that they’d eventually give up looking for him, perhaps thinking that a woolly beast of the native people had eaten him. John hears another door close before James comes back to the dining room. John doesn't even try to pretend that he wasn’t listening, James knows him too well for that.

James sits down on the chair across from him, “He shouldn’t have dragged you all this way.”

John wonders if his smile looks as forced as it feels, “I did try to tell him that. He refused to leave the camp until I agreed to come with him. I figured you’d want your...him, back eventually, so I conceded.”

“He’s a good man.” James’s eyes plead with John to understand.

John nods, his eyes are drawn to James’s own, starved for the green that had been able to read him so expertly, that had understood him as no one else ever had or will again. “He would have to be wouldn’t he, to catch your eye?”

“John--” James’s voice is too soft for John to bear.

John cuts him off, “I’m going back to the dock, see I can find a ship out.” John pushes his chair back and stands, two steps out of the room when James’s hand lands on his arm.

“John, wait. Stay a few days, we can--”

“We can what? Reminisce? About what? About the time I put you in shackles, or the time I pointed a gun at you or the time I sent half my men murder you?” John can hear the tremor in his voice, feel his throat start to close, his breath suddenly shallow. James says nothing, just watches John with those fucking eyes that haunt him every goddamn night. Just as he turns away, James’s quiet voice stops him.

“I forgave you before you’d even dropped me off. Before I’d even known for sure that you were telling the truth about Thomas, I’d already forgiven you.”

“Don’t.” John has to force the word out through gritted teeth. His body is frozen, disobeying his demand to move forward, to move away. He hears James approaching and he steels himself. The first touch nearly brings him to his knees. One hand, and then two on his shoulders, turning him. He can barely make out the floor under him for the well of tears gathered on his lower lashes. He refuses to look up, can’t bear to see the quiet understanding that he knows is written on James’s face. Instead he pushes forward, buries his face in James’s throat and sobs. 

James holds him, his hands stroking John’s back as he stands still and lets him cry. By the time John pulls back and wipes his nose on his sleeve, his eyes are nearly swollen shut.

“Stay.” James tries again.

John can only nod and say, “Not here, I’ll stay at the boarding house in town.” When James makes to open his mouth John shakes his head, “I can’t, James.” He can’t be in this house with the two of them and pretend that it doesn’t matter to him. James searches his face for long moments before nodding.

John only stays a few minutes longer before packing up a horse and heading back to town. The entire ride he debates keeping his promise to stay. James had told him to come back later, near dusk, that they’d have dinner.

Once he’s rented a room, he has a tub brought up to bathe, figures he might want to be presentable and clean off weeks worth of trail dust. He lets himself remember the feel of James’s arms around him, his hand stroking John’s head, the soft murmur of his name. It brings a fresh wave of grief. He presses his face to his knees and tries to breath through the emotion choking off his air. 

Hours later James answers the door, his own clothes changed his hair still damp. When he turns his head John can just make out the edge of a mark low on James’s throat, it’s dark and purple and John has to look away. John doesn’t miss the proprietary way Thomas touches James. He understands the message of Thomas’s hand low on James’s back. 

Throughout the evening he watches the gentle way they touch each other, the way they smile at one another. Longing opens a deep cavern in his chest that he knows will never be filled. He eats without tasting, smiling in all the right places, telling stories about Madi, her husband and the Maroon people. 

Later he begs off before Thomas can produce after dinner drinks, pleading exhaustion from the trip. James says he’ll be by the boarding house in the morning and John just nods.

***

Weeks it goes on, James refusing to leave him be, to let him return to the island and John too weak to say no to him; too hungry for the sight of him, the sound of him, to make good on his secret promise to up and go in the middle of the night.

Thomas is a constantly looming presence, a reminder of all the things that John is not. There’s a side of James that John had glimpsed before, a side that is out in full force now. He smiles, he laughs, there’s a softening of his edges that John knows he’d have never been able to coax forward and, despite his own heartache, he still believes he made the right choice. James has been able to go back to being the man he was supposed to be. A man with a clear conscious, a good man, the kind of man John could never be.

James suggests sparring one afternoon and John thinks it might be the perfect way to burn off some of the tension he can’t seem to shake. It helps to a degree, but it turns his nightmares into dreams of a different variety. He wakes up sweaty and hard, his body shivering from the too vivid images of giving himself to James, of finally tasting him and knowing the touch of his hands. The tension between them grows by the day, the both of them ignoring it as if that will make the heat that tethers them together disappear. 

It comes to a head late one afternoon and John should have seen it bearing down on them like storm on the horizon, but he’d been too exhilarated spending time with James again, too enthralled by his good humor and teasing, too preoccupied with the way the sweat glistened at the base of his throat, and still so in awe of the graceful way he moved, to bother worrying about the consequences of them becoming close once more.

It happens as their their swords are locked, John takes a step back and he stumbles, feels his legs go out from under him, his hand clutches at James’s shirt as a last ditch effort to keep himself upright, but all it succeeds in doing is jarring James off balance and bringing James down with him. They land on the ground hard and John’s breath is momentarily gone before it rushes back into him with a gasp. James’s face is inches from his own, his eyes lit up with mischief. They’re both breathing heavily, their bodies rubbing against each other and when John shifts, awareness slams into him. James’s body is warm and hard where it’s pressed against his. James’s hips are cradled between John’s spread thighs. James shifts, his hips pressing down and John can’t stop the moan, as his eyelids flutter. James stills, his eyes darting from John’s eyes to his lips and back. John sees it coming and does absolutely nothing to stop it, welcomes it the way he does good drink and the blessed relief of sleep. 

James’s mouth presses softly against his. John opens under James’s seeking tongue without hesitation. The kiss turns hungry and wet instantly. James’s tongue sinks deep, licks into his mouth with purpose, his hands clutching at John’s head. John strokes his fingers over James’s back, a broken moan spilling into James’s mouth. James plants his hands on the ground, his hips grinding down against John. John’s head goes back with a gasp, his hands going to James’s ass to keep him close. His own hips rocking up as the friction of their cocks rubbing together sizzles down his spine. James goes back to his mouth, one hot, deep kiss leads into another, their bodies working together, straining as John gets harder, starts to leak in his pants. James gets John’s pants down, and then his own, his hand wrapping around both of them and John can’t hold the whine that breaks free. He clutches at James’s shoulders, pleasure sliding through his veins hotly, his whole body feels like he’s been set on fire. He pushes his hips into James’s fist, his cock catching on James’s. He can’t help but look down, see the way James hold them both.

He strokes them quickly, their own slick easing the way. James’s eyes move back and forth between his hand and John’s face. John sees the awe, the deep seated need that they’d both denied for too long, he sees the softness in James’s face that James has only ever showed to someone else and it pushes John over the edge, his orgasm ripping through him like lightning, his hands clutching at James, a broken sob falling from his lips as he buries his face in James’s neck. He feels James shudder against him before a spilling warmth is added to his own as James gasps. 

James rolls off to his side bringing John with him. John can’t stop the tears, the harsh wracking cries shake his entire body as James holds him, his hands in John’s hair, stroking over his back with gentle hands until finally John settles. Realizing what he’s allowed to happen, John is pushing up and out of James’s space, fastening his pants with shaking hands, calling himself every kind of fool. How will he ever let go now, how can he ever hope to get over James after having had a taste of him? 

“John.” James takes a step forward

John’s head snaps up even as he’s shaking it from side to side. He holds his hand up, doesn’t allow James to come closer, feels tears gathering once again at the corners of his eyes. He has to stop this, he has to leave for good, finally follow through on the promise he made to himself. John turns and makes his way to the horses as quickly as possible. He makes a beeline for the boarding house, dashing his hand across his eyes as he rides. He’s so incredibly stupid. What had he been thinking staying here this long? What had he thought it would accomplish? He rushes up the stairs and draws his bags from under the bed.

He starts tossing clothes into his bag, his whole body shaking as his mind relives every second in glaring clarity. John could swear he can still hear the harsh labored sound of James’s breath as he’d stroked them both. He can still feel the way James’s fingers had squeezed around him, the look in James’s eyes had been something he didn’t think would ever be directed at him. But that only makes it worse.

John drops to the bed, his head falling into his hands as he fights off another bout of tears. He sits there staring blankly at the far wall until shadows move across the room and the candles need to be lit. When there’s a knock on the door John expects it to be the woman who owns the boarding house calling him for dinner. Instead it’s James. He steps inside and looks at John’s hastily packed bags.

“Don’t go.” James pleads.

“Did you tell him?”

James nods once, “He’s asked me to choose.” James’s voice breaks as he lets out a harsh breath.

John lowers his head to hide the bitter smile he can’t stop. Of course Thomas had asked him choose, Thomas already knows the answer, “Neither of us are built to share you.”

There’s no solution that doesn’t end in heartache. He’s been here months and all it’s done is show him how deeply embedded in his soul James truly is. All it’s shown him is the boundless love that he holds for a man that will never be his. It’s taught him that no one will ever be enough for him, that James is the only one who can make him feel like he’s worth something, make him feel whole.

John wraps his arms around himself, “Let me go. He’ll love you better than I ever could.”

James shakes his head as he crosses the room. He pulls John up and fuses their mouths together. James devours him, he steals the breath from John’s lungs as he pushes him backward toward the bed. The kiss is frantic, filled with teeth and tongue. He pulls at John’s clothes, at his own until they’re both naked and tumbling down onto the mattress. John doesn’t know how they get there but before he knows it James is rocking into him, filling him completely and John has to turn his head to hold in the sob that wants to escape. From the first time they’d met this is all he’s wanted, James’s body connected to his. 

He holds James close to him, his legs wrapping around James’s hips, his arms around his shoulders as James’s cock slides deep. He presses his face to James’s neck, pulls the scent of him as deeply as he can, locks it away with a million other small things that he’ll never forget. James takes him apart one slow inch at a time until he’s shaking and crying out, until James himself is just as lost, his face pressed to John’s neck, his voice a quiet rasp against John’s skin “I love you.” John feels wetness slide down his neck, hears the half sobs that James tries to hold in as he says it over and over, presses each word to John’s skin

After, they lay huddled together, breath mingling, bodies so twisted together neither of them are sure where they begin or end. James holds him tightly, lips pressed to John’s hair as if by sheer will he can freeze time. John holds him just as tightly, his senses memorizing the beat of James’s heart and the rhythm of his breath, the scent of his skin, the feel of his body under John’s fingers. 

John waits until James is snoring softly against his chest before he carefully extracts himself. He dresses quickly and as he’s tying his hair his fingers catch on the cord around his neck. He removes the knot and then gently ties it around James’s wrist. He’s desperate for a last kiss, one final touch of lips, but he doesn’t dare take it. His belongings are still packed from the night before, it’s only a matter of loading them quietly into the hall. With a final look, his eyes trace James’s face, his features lit by the full moon and he locks the picture inside of himself before silently closing the door. John never returns to the Maroon camp. Long John Silver goes back on the account, Flint’s banner adorning his mast.


End file.
